What Happened in the 2010s
The second part on the 21st century, so far.
Following my reflection on the first half of the 2000s, American-Canadian writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy wrote her retrospective of the long 2010s, from Obama to the pandemic. It had nothing to do with me but with Freddie deBoer’s post and her articles for the Canadian Jewish News on the cancellations of fashion commentator Leandra Medine Cohen and actress Lena Dunham.
Maltz Bovy published a book about the perils of getting fixated on the concept of privilege in 2017 and added another word that could define the era: Problematic. Medine Cohen and Dunham were canceled, disliked, not because they were accused of, for example, bullying, or siding with an accused rapist. It’s because they were problematic.
We who have memories of the decade remember what problematic meant. Not openly racist but making fans and employees unhappy. Not a bully, but you’re problematic too if you put them as your role model. And I was inside the “is this problematic?” battlefield.
To continue my personal story: I went home to Indonesia with an Honours degree while disillusioned, knowing I had forfeited the chance to find happiness in Australia. Just like what I said about God gave me what I wanted and left me with the consequence, I taught at my dream workplace, a small-scale international school close to home, where I liked everyone more than they liked me.
As it happened, The Jakarta Post published my op-ed as I cleared my desk, and I got another dream job. Be a public intellectual like my idol Robert Manne. Got my name on Page 4 of the page every fortnight with a hot take on Asia.
Then Barack Obama got elected and everyone (except several Republican Americans) thought that the cool America of the 1990s was back. If 9/11 restarted history, maybe Obama had ended history in the Fukuyaman way (obviously he’s not a Fukuyaman) again. Certainly, he faced many enemies: The Great Recession. Racist Republicans grouping as the Tea Party. A resurging and unfriendly China and Russia, along with the wild cards of India and Brazil, who could go either way.
Indonesians and other Southeast Asians worried that the Great Recession would come here too, and for Chinese Indonesians, the fear that another 1998 was returning. Megawati, a former president beloved by the Chinese in the golden years of the early 2000s, allied with a figure linked to 1998 riots, Prabowo Subianto, who is now the president of Indonesia.
But there was no recession because it seems that the Great Recession, on household level, affected just the West, while Asia was rising, along with Indonesia. 2009 was a reversal of 1999, when Asia was having a financial crisis while the Atlantic enjoyed a perfect fin de siècle. Americans blamed capitalism, corporate greed, and government mismanagement, while the simplest explanation could be that the money all went to the Global South.
Because the West continued feeling unhappy, I continued feeling unhappy. I lost a friend to a brain tumor, my quest to become one of the Chinese Indonesians had mixed results, and my Aznpride peaked. I refused to watch American movies and TV shows, to listen to British and American pop, and to read American novels that didn’t have positive representations of Asian Americans. There it was, I had adopted the American identity politics long before it was mainstream.
Then, 2013. The Great Recession was ending, I got tired of trying to be an East Asian (perhaps the popularity of “Gangnam Style” was another granted wish – a world-beating K-pop song, in all those ways), and I got another “Loving my job than it loved me” experience. Then came along the Mother.
Cristin Milioti’s performance as the Mother in How I Met Your Mother returned my interest in American culture and my love for white women. I was one of many who were devastated by the series’ end and got over it by writing a listicle for Zooey Deschanel’s HelloGiggles, which was accepted and now missing, as the website itself was last updated in April 2023.
It was a one-time opportunity, but enough to introduce me to the world of girlboss feminism. By 2015 I had a column for an Indonesian feminist website, the column was half-officially titled the New Guy (the editors’ idea, again in the spirit of liberal feminism of the era). The website was certainly to my liking, from the name to the style – classier than Jezebel, Gen X oriented, mixing American current issues with Indonesian women’s immediate problems.
The American digital feminism war was well established by 2015. My issue was Gamergate, and I did a radio interview with a women’s station (Cosmo affiliated, I guess) to explain what it was. I was with Her, which connected me with many American Democrat journalists, academics, and semi-anon influencers. Finally, I got into the superheroine fandom, which was hardly populated by straight men, even though these superheroines were played by Gal Gadot and Scarlett Johansson, two actresses popular for straight men.
I truly enjoyed the Resistance era of the late 2010s, unaware of the heterodox writers who were fighting both the MAGAs and the woke. As Wi-Fi connection had become affordable worldwide, feminists in Indonesia could read the immediate thoughts of American and British feminists and connected with Southeast Asian feminists. Those studying in the West could trade instant information with their pals back in Jakarta, Singapore, or Rio (Brazilians also drive fandom subcultures from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Taylor Swift, for some reason).
The trouble had seemed evident by 2018. As white people, cis white men, and white women’s tears got blamed in Black and queer Twitter circles, the same idea got digested by Southeast Asian trendsetters. Privilege had become a main discourse, whether focusing on class or race. Southeast Asian women I followed began to tweet about Chinese privilege in Singapore and white women’s privilege in Bali. And yes, Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift became villains too for Indonesian feminists. Boo for fair skin, boo for heteronormativity, and boo for privilege. Yay for darker skin, yay for queerness, and yay for the BIPOCs.
Before continuing to 2019, here is what I think happened. First, Americans wanted a regime change after the Great Recession. Not in the government, of course, but in their daily lives. In their workplaces, social networks, entertainment, and role models. White women wanted it first – a black male POTUS would be followed by a female one. This didn’t happen, and black women, who were the largest voters of Hillary Clinton, rebelled next. White women, here including Jewish women, tried to keep the alliance strong, but both Pussyhat and MeToo failed to hold the alliance. My favorite story of the decade is how the Women’s March had been hijacked from the start by both Black Lives Matter and Nation of Islam activists, a clear preview of the state of American activism years later.
And finally, the global social media. I have a theory that the race riots of the mid-1960s were driven by the television, as more poor black Americans saw how the more affluent white suburbanites lived, through the ads and sitcoms. There were no race riots in the late 2010s, just cancellation as white collar workers saw how their superiors, idols, and fellow citizens dined, shopped, and lived. All the problematic lifestyles.
Certainly, the people who problematized the idols were not poor themselves. They held bachelor’s degrees. They had office jobs. They read English and could speak it better than me. But that’s the point. Fairly or not, some copywriting BAs got better lives than others, and in the late 2010s USA many men and women of color united against the same enemy. The white woman, shortened as Becky and then Karen. This common enemy united the disgruntled multitudes.
To the end, then, to 2019. My newspaper submissions were regularly rejected for multiple reasons. I went to dining parties where other guests were no longer jolly gays and lesbians who sang Bjork and Pulp with me, but dour nonbinaries who I never saw before and weren’t interested in talking to me. My request for sabbatical was turned into a column cancellation over low readership. I was just happy nobody wrote me any hate mail.
Summer 2020 just topped what followed before, alongside the pandemic. All the envy compounded by Instagram, Twitter, and a dynamic global bourgeois who could see and live anywhere in the world. An economic system that could provide for all but just enough for most, and more than enough to some (acceptable in the 1990s, but no longer in the 2010s). A distrust for the American Promise.
That is my observation of the 2010s and what happened there. The pandemic and its associated lockdowns, along with the Biden administration, might have given space to the rise of the heterodox writers and their websites. Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022, Substack took off led by Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, and I returned as a heterodox, probably the only one in Indonesia. And I’m at the best time of my life. In this chaotic decade, problematization still happens (just check Bluesky). But it has no effect now.